Inside Rivian’s Strategy to Survive a Hostile EV Market

Kara talks with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe at a tense time for electric vehicles: domestic sales have cooled, federal EV tax credits are gone, and tariffs are raising costs across supply chains. Rivian’s premium R1S SUV and R1T pickup helped establish the brand — the R1S is now the best-selling premium electric SUV in the country — but the company is still losing money. The R2, Rivian’s midsize SUV will hit showrooms this year, and Scaringe says it will be “an inflection point for us as a business.” Kara presses him on how to win buyers cross-shopping hybrids and gas vehicles, and what it takes to compete with both Tesla and low-cost, highly capable Chinese EV makers. They also dig into Rivian’s joint venture with Volkswagen Group, the economics of scaling an EV startup, and why Scaringe believes autonomy will eventually become as critical as having “tires on a vehicle.” Plus: Aurora CEO Chris Urmson asks why Rivian doesn't have CarPlay. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is R.J. Skaringe. He's the founder and CEO of the electric vehicle company Rivian. They're making two cars right now, the R1S, a seven-seat SUV, and the R1T, a five-seat pickup truck. Rivian, though, is about to roll out a smaller SUV in the coming months, and the company has also announced a bunch of plans for more self-driving and autonomous vehicle tech. But it's not a great time to be an all-EV company right now. Sales of electric cars plunged at the end of last year. That was especially true for high-end EVs like the ones Rivian makes. There's lots of reasons why, but the big one was that President Trump and congressional Republicans ended the federal tax credit

• 0:57Kara Swisher?

  to help people buy EVs. Basically, a new EV got $7,500 more expensive overnight. Tariffs certainly haven't helped the situation, but it's a big deal for a company like Rivian, which still isn't turning a profit yet. I think Rivian's a fascinating company. I think it's a beautiful car. I've tested it many times. I've never met R.J., which is odd. But he's a very thoughtful CEO, in a way that Elon Musk used to be, and has some interesting thoughts on where things are going. He's certainly an important player in the area. And as most people know, I've been obsessed with autonomous vehicles and electric cars for 20 years, and have driven in most of them many, many years ago, and have been a real proponent of them,

• 1:38Kara Swisher?

  though I absolutely see the difficulty he and other car companies face. I also want a world where there's more choice, where Tesla isn't the only choice. And of course, consumers are already answering that question by not buying Teslas. Sales are down quite a bit. So I always root for new competitors in this country, and across the world, actually. And I certainly don't want it to be a situation where the Chinese makers get to dominate everything. All right, let's get into my conversation with R.J. Skaringe. Our expert question comes from someone I have great regard for Chris Urmson, the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Aurora. First person I ever worked really closely with on understanding where electric cars and autonomous vehicles were going. So don't go anywhere.

• 2:37Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 3:21Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them ever talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try it today for free at Odoo.com/kara. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Kara.

• 4:04Speaker 01

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• 4:51Kara Swisher?

  RJ, thanks for coming on ON.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

• 4:56Kara Swisher?

  So let's get started. Right now, Rivian makes an SUV and a pickup truck. And on the commercial side, you have a work van. Some baseline models cost a little more than $70,000. Most are north of 80K. Talk about the price point on the consumer side. You're obviously in the luxury market. So talk about who your customer is, who you're making vehicles for, and which models are driving the most revenue.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we launched our first products at the end of 2021. It was our R1, what we call our R1T and our R1S. It's a sibling pair of vehicles. And these are flagship products. So they're intended to be, you know, premium products. As you said, the price points are high. So the average selling price on R1 is around $90,000. And that was our handshake with the world. It was how we introduced Rivian as a brand to consumers. And we're now about to launch, we're like months away from launching what we call R2, which is a much lower priced vehicle, starts at $45,000. And it's really our first true mass market vehicle. Whereas the R1, being a flagship product,

• 6:06Speaker 02

  you know, it sells extremely well. It's the best selling premium electric SUV in the United States by a significant degree. But just the nature of the price point limits, you know, how accessible the product is. And so R2 for us represents such an important inflection point for the business.

• 6:24Kara Swisher?

  So who is the customer? Who is it for? Because, you know, as for the truck, then it's not really a work truck. How are people using it?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that gets into like the deeper question of what's the brand's purpose? And there's, I think often when you think about products like this, like a vehicle, it's easy to sort of immediately jump to what are the specs? Like what's its zero to 60 or what's its cargo capacity? But there's a little bit more, I think there's a deeper meaning to what's the sum of the parts? What is it? What is it? What's the feeling it's trying to evoke? And so for us as a brand, we've long talked about the desire to not only enable people to go do the kinds of things you want to have memories of for years and years, or the kinds of things you'd want to take a photograph of, but also to inspire those things.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  And so to inspire this adventurous lifestyle or to inspire a life of saying yes to new experiences. And so R2 is just an extension of that. It takes that same concept that we've delivered on in R1 of lots of little detailed design elements that all lead to this inspiration around adventure to something that's a smaller form factor, but also importantly, a much lower price point.

• 7:37Kara Swisher?

  So why, just explain for people who don't understand, why start there at those price points? Obviously, you often start with wealthier people and then it trickles down in the car business, but sometimes it absolutely doesn't.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  In the very beginning, so four years ago, when we were launching R1, we didn't have any production volume, no supply chain scale or experience, none of the leverage that comes with generating scale and generating momentum with suppliers for pricing. And so just by virtue of those constraints, it's helpful to have the first product, which is going to be lower volume, be a higher priced product. And then as we build scale and capabilities, the goal of course is to introduce lower priced products. And then specifically with how we arrived at the price, content, performance trade off of R2, like we could have made it a lower price, but not as, you know, not as high performance or lower price, but with a lot of those features, is we were trying to identify

• 8:34Speaker 02

  where is that sweet spot in terms of volume? The buyers that are going to be looking for this type of a product and found that to be in this like, as I said, like this, starting at $45,000, which allows it to be cross shopped with a lot of internal combustion vehicles.

• 8:51Kara Swisher?

  Right, exactly. The analogy, of course, is that iPhone, which was quite expensive when it first started. And then it's still expensive, but it's widely used. If people are looking for an affordable car, because people are very price sensitive right now, how do you convince them? I have the most boring cars. I have a Chevy Bolt and a Kia Hybrid, and I'm actually in the market for a car, and I'm looking at the Rivian, too. I absolutely am. But what would be the selling point for someone like me?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for, well, first, your question is on pricing. You know, at the higher end, like where R1 sits, so the R1S gets, you know, it's cross shopped with Land Rovers that are, or Range Rovers that are much more expensive. You know, everything from Range Rovers, Escalades, Porsches, BMWs, and then into, you know, Tesla Model 3, Model Y. So you have like a pretty broad range of customers coming out of a broad range of price points. But I'd say pricing parity is there with R1's competitive set. And actually, the evidence to that is, is take California, the state of Washington. The R1S isn't just the best selling premium electric SUV. It's the best selling premium SUV in the state

• 9:57Speaker 02

  of California. So for SUVs priced over $70,000, R1S outsells everything. So then the question is, okay, if we move into the category of $45,000 and up, which then you're suddenly in the world of, you know, more mass market cars, the kinds of things you'd expect to see, you know, broad portions of population buying. And then it's like, like there's a wonderfully broad aperture through which you're, you're attracting and potentially appealing to customers as they're making the decisions as to whether they buy. And I think one of the things that's, maybe one of the most important things that's often missed around electrification is there is a surprising lack of choice. And so at the,

• 10:39Speaker 02

  at the, call it 45 to 55,000 dollar price point, there's a handful of choices that are compelling. And you contrast that with truly hundreds of internal combustion choices that are compelling. And a wide array of form factors and design decisions that have been made by each of the companies. And so for us to see adoption grow beyond what we have today in the United States around 8%, I really believe we need a lot more choice. And you see so much concentration of market shares today with one company, with Tesla. And that's not a reflection of a healthy market, it's a reflection of a market that's being underserved. It's a reflection of just not enough choices.

• 11:22Kara Swisher?

  You were the first automakers, you noted, to bring a fully electric truck to the market. You beat out Ford, GM, and Tesla and began delivering the R1T in the fall of 2021, as you said. This last couple of years has been tough on all carmakers and especially EV makers. You've had to deal with pandemics, supply chain issues, chip shortages, inflations, now tariffs while building your brand. And also consumer disinclination, which is still, I believe that will change. I think that's a shifting kind of thing, but it's still there. A lot of these carmakers have pulled back, obviously. Talk about the time now and about delivering the R2 in the next few months. A lot of people, including the publication Inside EVs, describe the RT as a make or break product for you.

• 12:07Kara Swisher?

  So talk a little bit about that because as most people know, Rivian isn't profitable yet. Huge losses. I mean, nothing compared to AI, so don't worry about it. But go ahead.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, R2 is, you know, you could call many things. It's a make or break product. It's the product that's really given me an inflection point for us as a business. You know, and there's nothing, that's not at all surprising to us. In fact, that was the plan. You know, certainly many things have gone differently than we expected, but the plan was always to establish the brand with a flagship product that by virtue of its price would be more limiting in its scale. But invest in a whole host of vertically integrated capabilities from our technologies, that's electronics, software, autonomy, AI, all the way through to our distribution channels.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  We're building sales channels, service channels, we're building a charging network. So essentially be investing at a very heavy level. So with this level of vertical integration, so lots of fixed costs, both on the building of these teams to do that, but also just in terms of running the enterprise that in the beginning, when it's just R1. Isn't enough to offset the cost to run all those big systems, but Rivian isn't being designed as just for R1. So if the goal was to build a company that's only going to make 50,000 cars a year, it would look very different as a business, but we've really invested in the business contemplating and planning for Rivian to be a much larger company. And so because

• 13:41Speaker 02

  of that, R2 does need to be successful to support the rate of capital consumption of the business because of how much tech we're developing and how much infrastructure we're building. And so because of that, we've also really wanted to make sure R2 is dialed. And so there's been a lot of iteration in the product, a lot of learning from the R1. I just drove one of the early manufacturer validation builds off the line last week. And I mean, the car is just incredible. So we're quite bullish on it, but we also recognize, you know, it needs to get into the market and we're very hopeful that it will resonate in the same way that the R1 products have resonated, meaning-

• 14:24Kara Swisher?

  Although it has to, cannot just merely match sales of your R1s, correct?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  No, but if, yeah, correct, on a gross basis, but what I'm saying is on a market share basis. So if I were to take, take the R1 relative to, let's say, a Model X, we significantly outsell the Model X. They're priced about the same, very different in terms of how they've been interpreted from a design, aesthetic, design decision, or engineering decision point of view, but covering a very similar ground. If we could even have a fraction of the market share we have on R1-

• 14:57Kara Swisher?

  So taking it from them, presumably?

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Taking it, or I think more likely, some of that will inherently happen, but more likely just creating an option for folks that haven't been able to jump from an ICE into an EV yet because the choice wasn't there for them. If you look at it through the lens of a customer, if I want a midsize SUV today and I want one that's like very robust technology, but I don't like the way a Tesla Model Y looks, or I'm not attracted to the brand, I'm really without other choice. And so I think-

• 15:28Kara Swisher?

  Johnny Ive once told me that Tesla's looks like the inside of an egg and I tend to agree with him. It was eviscerating in such an elegant way, but go ahead.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  That's funny.

• 15:41Kara Swisher?

  So this has to sell, right? The company's

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:44Kara Swisher?

  future rests on this car, correct?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, if it doesn't sell, we've got to rethink some things about the business.

• 15:50Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely. So just in addition to the R2, Rivian is set to release a smaller crossover, the R3. You have a joint venture with Volkswagen to develop software and electronics. And the investment is about $6 billion. VW will use the technology across its brands, including Porsche and Audi. A bit of a struggling company too, but they're trying to rejigger themselves. But talk about being the software and electronics company that works with legacy automakers. Not a bad business.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Volkswagen Group, this is the second largest car company in the world by volume.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Did a $5.8 billion deal with us, a software licensing deal, as you said, for us to take our electronics and our software and deploy them across their portfolio, brands and products. And that's really exciting to us because it's so deeply aligned to the mission. But it answers this question we talked about a moment ago, which is the lack of choice and the need for more choices and highly compelling choices at that.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  But, you know, one of the things about automotive that is, I think, often maybe overlooked is just the nature of how car companies and the skillsets embedded within car companies evolved over the last, call it 60, 70 years. And of course, cars, if you go back, were very analog. And so prior to the 1960s, there was not a single computer in a car. There wasn't a single line of code.

• 17:19Kara Swisher?

  No, I was there. I so miss rolling up my window.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so all that, all the electronics that have entered into the vehicle actually were born out of, very ironically, fuel injection systems. It was the first computer in the car was to control fuel injectors. And car companies at that time, this was in the 1960s, made the decision to push the electronics for the fuel injection systems to third parties, to suppliers. And not necessarily planned and, and you know, you could do a whole study on this, but, but over the course of the subsequent 60 years, anything that started to enter the vehicle that was electrically controlled or controlled through software had a little computer come with it, what we now call ECUs. And, you know, over the, over the fullness

• 18:06Speaker 02

  of time, cars went from having no computers to today having 100 to maybe 150 little ECUs that have their own little island of software that's written by a supplier to control the function or the domain that it's associated with. And it's almost the exact opposite of how you design a software architecture and a network architecture if you're going to do it from scratch today, where you'd say, I want to have a very small number of computers that have a very broad function set that are located geographically within the vehicle or in a zone of the vehicle to control everything in that zone. And so if you're starting with a clean sheet, you'd, you'd very quickly arrive at this idea of centralized compute,

• 18:47Speaker 02

  more of a zonal architecture. And so Tesla, of course, has an architecture that looks like that and Rivian has that. And we're the only two companies today that have this, you know, very unique.

• 18:59Kara Swisher?

  But could you see a situation where it becomes just a software and electronics only company that works with legacy automaker?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  I don't, it's certainly not the plan. We would.

• 19:08Kara Swisher?

  We want a car.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, we would do both. And the, the business of, like, we're quite bullish on the, the nature of the business, meaning if you have, once you make these investments in these core technologies and provided you're building a brand that has a level of desire building and excitement around it, there's really an enormous opportunity to capture customers and, and market share. And in the margin structure, we think particularly with the introduction of more technology in the form of artificial intelligence and self-driving, only further grows what we think is the business.

• 19:40Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 19:55Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international affairs,

• 20:38Kara Swisher?

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• 22:12Kara Swisher?

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• 23:19Kara Swisher?

  So, let's talk a little bit about some of the obstacles you're facing, though, because let's talk about consumers, because that's really where the... I hate to make metaphors, but rubber meets the road. The big one right now is that EV sales in the US took a nosive at the end of last year. Rivian's fourth quarter sales were down more than 30% compared to the same period. Now, that's not unique to Rivian, by the way. Ford stopped making F-150 Lightning, which I tried out, terrific car. GM paused production of its electric Hummers, which I also tried out, cool car. And Cadillac Escalade, same thing. Beautiful car, actually. The Escalade was stunning. Stellantis canceled plans for an all-electric Ram pickup truck. Now, I get that, because when I wrote a column six years ago and said, "Someday, you're not going to own a car," most of the letters I got were from truck people who were like

• 24:03Kara Swisher?

  in the Midwest, "We want our cars." I'm like, "Fine." I think it was like having a horse, something like that. And I said, "Fine, have your fucking horse. I don't care." But this is where it's going. Like, it's like the people who like a phone in their house. I don't think EVs are going there. I'm quite bullish on them, too. But what do you do to deal with... Obviously, the drop in the man, you've had to cut 600 employees. Many carmakers are doing this. Tesla's fallen off a cliff, really, even though the stock keeps growing. That's a whole different meme situation. But one of the reasons for the drop in sales is because Trump administration and congressional Republicans ended federal tax credits for people buying EVs, which has been around for a long time. Trump has three more years in his term. So how do you navigate those years?

• 24:45Kara Swisher?

  Given if the federal government is working against efforts to push more people and companies towards EVs?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the way we think about it is ultimately our job, and that is, I think this is true for any company that's making products, is to develop products that are highly compelling. And in order to truly drive electrification adoption, the products need to be not like slightly better or as good as, they need to be a wildly more compelling choice than an ICE alternative. And so that was the philosophy that, you know, drove me to start Rivian was before any of these policies existed. This philosophy still drives us today as we think about R2. And so when we look at it, it's the performance, it's like zero to 60, the driving dynamics need to be exceptional, best in class.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  The storage and functionality and features that allow you to fit your gear, your pets, your stuff need to be really thoughtful. The design needs to be something that's compelling. And then range in the time to charge the vehicle need to be really nice. And, you know, this is perhaps the one that's maybe most difficult to explain until you experience it, which is once you try an EV and eliminate the need to go to a gas station. And if you have charging at your home, which most, most folks do in the United States, of course, there's challenges in highly urban environments, but in most of the United States.

• 26:15Kara Swisher?

  It's not that hard anymore.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not that hard.

• 26:16Kara Swisher?

  It isn't.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  And it's, it's really nice. Your cars, you don't have to think about, did I put fuel in it? You charge it at night. And there's like all the benefits, the intrinsic sort of hard to measure benefits of it's quiet, it's smooth. And so we do think that with the existence of more choice, that that demand will naturally come up. And there's something here that, and speaking to the consumer, I think is really. Maybe unexpected if you were to just listen to all the rhetoric and all the noise, which is, we look at our customers today, our R1 customers. And if you were to just extract out some of the tone you hear on these topics, you would expect 95% of our customers to be Democrat and a small fraction of you Republican.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  And the truth is, actually, it's about 50/50. And I think that's great news. And what it tells me is customers are going to choose something that appeals to them and regardless of maybe political tone.

• 27:14Kara Swisher?

  There's only one political car that exists, is a Cybertruck. But go ahead.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  And so.

• 27:19Kara Swisher?

  There's zero others, really.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  So when we see that, it's encouraging. And we try really hard as a company to not politicize the idea of electrification. It's strangely become political in ways that I wouldn't have expected and are somewhat.

• 27:36Kara Swisher?

  Well, Elon is the problem for you, for all of you, honestly, in that regard.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, nonetheless, so we just have said, let's focus on making the best cars. And so in doing that, there are externalities that have happened in the last six months.

• 27:50Kara Swisher?

  What is the greatest consumer sentiment against them? Obviously, I think most people are intrigued. There's no question. Everybody now knows about them. And when I started pushing electric cars many, many years ago, most people didn't or wouldn't consider it. Obviously, range anxiety is one of the issues. But from your perspective, what has shifted?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I sort of bucket it maybe into three categories. I think there are people who are open to it and looking for the right car. So they want an EV, maybe they own one, or maybe they don't. In many cases, they don't because they just haven't had the form factor, you know, what they need for function, coupled with price, coupled with something that they emotionally connect to. And so we believe there's a lot of folks there and we have, like, we see this firsthand with customers or most of our R1 customers are first time EV buyers and they were in that category, that the product they were looking for hadn't arrived yet. The second category are people that are curious but have those concerns, range anxiety. You know, my folks live 600 miles away. I want to be able to drive to their

• 28:51Speaker 02

  house at Christmas and not have to worry about charging along the way. Those kinds of things. And then the third category, which is by far the smallest, but I do think the most vocal, are folks that for some reason have identified electric vehicles as being bad or wanting to be against them. And I do think this is a very small percentage, but it's quite, it can generate noise. And I've reflected a lot as to what's the psychology driving that. And I don't know, I'm certainly not a psychologist, but if I, but if I had to like project a gas, I would say it's some version of, I think folks that feel like a solution's being pushed onto them or forced onto them are inclined to naturally reject that.

• 29:34Kara Swisher?

  Well, the haters include the President of the United States. Clearly, he talks about them quite negatively. How do you navigate that next period, especially if they continue to be hostile? And on top of axing the federal tax credit, Trump's also slapped tariffs. That may change, but it'll take a while. So talk a little bit about the Trump impact here on your business.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Well, and to that last category, so folks that are, let's say, against electric vehicles, I think the first thing we do from a consumer point of view is we make it very clear that we're not, like, we want there to be choice. And I think the existence of choice helps eliminate some of those tensions. And to say, look, if you don't want to buy an electric car, you don't need to buy an electric car. But we're making these vehicles to be really compelling, and hopefully you drive it and you experience it and it sways you or draws you in. I think as it pertains to policy and working with the administration, what we've really focused on,

• 30:32Speaker 02

  which is an important point, is the indisputable view that over time, and we can debate how long that is, but in the fullness of time. High technology vehicles where there's lots of software, lots of electronics. They're deeply integrated together. The vehicles increasingly drive themselves. The skill sets necessary around power electronics and battery systems. Those are things that the US should continue to maintain a leadership position in. And so in order for that to happen, it's necessary that companies like Rivian, not just Rivian, but Rivian and many other companies like Rivian,

• 31:16Speaker 02

  need to exist to be active participants in the future technology development that we're going to see play out over the next few decades. And we found that's it's a really, I think it resonates extremely well on all sides of the aisle. It's also really helpful to look at it through that lens of skills.

• 31:35Kara Swisher?

  Is Trump undermining that idea?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't, I don't think he's.

• 31:39Kara Swisher?

  You're being careful.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  I think there's, I think there's a lot of.

• 31:42Kara Swisher?

  Yes, but go ahead. Go ahead. You answer anyway you want.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  I, I think there's a lot of, what we try really hard to do is, there's a lot of noise. There's like the signal to noise ratio right now is it's, you know, if you're looking at this as like a, a signal processing problem, it's the noisiest the signal has ever been. And so we're trying really hard to ignore or avoid riding up and down some of the peaks of the noise and look for the signal.

• 32:12Kara Swisher?

  But, but credits did matter. So do tariffs.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:15Kara Swisher?

  You know?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, credits, credits like created it like, to be clear. I mean, you talked about the Q4 drop off relative to Q3. There's no doubt, yeah, the credits going away impacted everyone. But I don't think that's going to change the end state. It's a, it's like a speed bump. It's a bump along the way, but something that we all have to navigate.

• 32:34Kara Swisher?

  Right, which could take your entire chassis off compared to other car makers with more money. But it, and this is a very, for people who don't understand, car making is so expensive compared to other, I mean, you joke, I joke about AI, but it's really is a high level of, it's, it's a very difficult jump for everybody. So it's, and it's actually quite astonishing how we make cars. A lot of ways, but now Canada has agreed to slash its hundred percent tariffs on Chinese EVs, which is not a good news for you all. You've argued the customers need more choice in the EV market, and that's not a zero sum game. But wow, it's a real problem for you from a global market point of view because you can't compete with these Chinese companies because of the price and innovation, really.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think first, just to frame the overall Chinese market, it's very, very, very different than what we have in the United States. There's a couple of ways it's very different. The first is there are many choices there, like an overwhelming number of choices. So there's an excess of 100 different companies making electric vehicles in China. And actually, a vast majority of them are not particularly compelling in terms of technology or innovation, but a subset of those are both affordable and impressive technology. Companies like Xiaomi or BYD, you know, very much, you know, technically demonstrating a lot of leadership and then from a price point of view, quite competitive. And there are two things to take away from that.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  The first, which I think is often overlooked, is for a lot of the same reasons Rivian or Tesla have vertically integrated technology stacks that are distinctly different than legacy car companies, is we had the benefit of starting with a clean sheet in a world where software and electronics existed. And so we, like Rivian was built as a software and electronics company first, and we make cars. And so we have more software engineers than we do mechanical engineers.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  And that same dynamic exists for a number of the newer Chinese car companies, where they approached it as a technology-first business.

• 34:38Kara Swisher?

  Sure did.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  They made architectural decisions that are advantaged relative to legacy manufacturers. And if you were to take those cars apart and compare them to a Rivian, you'd see there's technically, there's actually a lot of similarity. Zonal architecture is really heavy focus on in-vehicle inference and compute for enabling AI features at scale over time.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  You know, like removal of a lot of the tier one supply base and bringing a lot of that in-house, a lot of consistency. And then you say, well, why are the cost structures so different? And here, I do think too often we look at this as if it's like some like black art. It's like magic happening.

• 35:17Kara Swisher?

  No.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  But it's not magic. It's you can build it in a spreadsheet and it's a combination of things. The first is the the cost of capital in China. So the cost to build the plant and invest in the products is very low, near zero. Because in many cases, the plant and the and the equipment is paid for by the government. So whereas we have to raise capital with with equity or some debt. In China, you get sort of given the capital to go build capacity.

• 35:46Kara Swisher?

  Yes, they have decided this is an area they want to dominate.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  And so it's like, it's very much a decision by the Chinese government to say, we're going to be leaders in this space. And so they've heavily subsidized the capital necessary to build these businesses. That's number one. The second is that's not just happening at the OEMs. That's happening across the tiered supply. And so you take the cost of capital to close to zero. The whole supply base suddenly becomes cheaper because your amortization of your fixed cost becomes a lot less. Then you have a labor cost that's much, much lower and labor policies that are very different. So you have people that go and work and live at a plant, working 50 to 60 hours a week

• 36:29Speaker 02

  and making somewhere between one fifth and one seventh of what someone in the United States would make. And there's no way with that difference in labor costs to really have and the cost of capital to have a like for like one to one.

• 36:44Kara Swisher?

  I get all that. They're also very innovative. I think one of the canards.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Well, there's my point first. That's why I wanted to call out, like, I think sometimes we just say, oh, it's low cost. There's a handful of companies that are very, very

• 36:54Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  strong in terms of technology and they have these advantaged cost structures.

• 36:59Kara Swisher?

  So here you have Trump slashing slashing the credits, putting on the tariffs, which makes it very difficult for all kinds of companies. And Canada agreed to slash this. It might have been favorable to you had we had a pleasant relationship. Now it's toxic and largely due to the Trump administration. In fact, completely due to Trump. Why am I being nice about it? So how do you compete if this is the case? Especially this Canadian thing was is a big deal.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so.

• 37:30Kara Swisher?

  We have 100% tariff for people don't know on Chinese EVs.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's an important point to note.

• 37:35Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  I think at first, as I called out, there's two vectors here to consider. So first is we have to compete on technology. And you made that point a couple of times. I couldn't more fully agree with you. And it's for that reason, you know, Rivian has many of the cars we just described. We own them, we study them, we take them apart, just like the Chinese have our cars and take them apart and study them. And so we need to continue to be on the tip of the spear in terms of technology and leading there. Number one, on cost, there's not a way to be competitive where labor cost is so much lower or cost of capital is so much lower. And so I think what will happen in the United States, and I can't speak for other countries.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  I think it's very, very, very likely that the tariffs the United States have put in place will remain. And for the Chinese to really participate in this market, they'll need to locally produce. And if they decide to locally produce, those advantages I just talked about, both in terms of cost of capital, but also in terms of labor costs, just go away. And there's not, they're not building the cars differently. You're to take a Chinese car apart and compare it to a Rivian.

• 38:42Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Like their stamping and castings, it's all very similar processes. Again, there's no like, there's no like magic happening. It's, it's just, you know, there's two big factors. And so I think in the United States, which is by far the second largest car mark in the world, the first being China, is maybe the one topic that the right and the left are very aligned on, which is a pro-US policy. Now, I think Europe's a big open question, as you've already called out. The interesting thing there is they have a large domestic auto industry.

• 39:15Kara Swisher?

  They do also.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  To protect as well. But a lot of the countries that don't have domestic auto industry are likely to be more open or fully open to Chinese vehicles. And I do think it's going to see a lot of market share shift to those brands now. What's also happening, which is we haven't touched on yet, but is an important point, is just the nature of how cars are produced is going to change over the next 10 years. And this is an area where we're going to start to see industrial automation and high dexterity robotics.

• 39:45Kara Swisher?

  Sure.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Come in that this is truly the only way the United States can compete with low labor cost countries for manufacturing is by by developing robotics to essentially operate manufacturing plants with far fewer people. And so I do think that's something that is going to happen.

• 40:06Kara Swisher?

  Which of course takes time.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  And to that point, we I started a robotics company recently called Mind Robotics that's specifically focused on industrial automation, industrial robotics.

• 40:17Kara Swisher?

  Separately from your company.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Rivian's a shareholder in it, but but it's a it's a separate entity.

• 40:23Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I've been talking a lot about the everyone's focused on AI. I'm like, you need to focus on robotics is what you actually need to focus.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more.

• 40:31Kara Swisher?

  I I keep saying it and everyone's like, I was like, stop with the AI will be a critical part of robotics, but it's robotics in terms of lots of things will matter a great deal. We'll be back in a minute.

• 40:56Speaker 03

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• 43:22Kara Swisher?

  Every episode we get a question from an outside expert, by the way, and yours comes from Chris Urmson, the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Aurora. I rode in one of my first cars of his, and I tried to run him over, as he knows, with the electric car, in Google parking lot. This was almost 20 years ago. So let's, let's listen to him.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I'm a big fan of Chris.

• 43:40Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, me too.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  Hey, this is Chris Armson. My question for RJ is this. I've been a Rivian truck owner for many years now. I love it. It looks great. It has awesome performance. The one area that could really be improved is the media experience. Can you talk a little bit about the strategy behind why you haven't leaned into the CarPlay ecosystem? And why you think that leads to a better experience for customers? Particularly given for new car buyers, somewhere between a third and a half of them aren't interested in buying a car if it doesn't have CarPlay. Anyway, cheering for you from the sideline, huge fan. Thanks for all you're doing.

• 44:16Kara Swisher?

  He gave you an easy one, but I would agree. I have to say it matters. I'm just as superficial.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  No, it's a great question. Chris and I have talked about that a lot in the past. We have the view that the integration of vehicle capabilities, so vehicle status, vehicle health, vehicle, you know, so like window position, vehicle speed, anything that has to do with how the vehicle's operating into, as context, into the media or user interface experience is going to be really important. And we want to control that whole, essentially the whole platter. And we think that becomes more important as AI enters more and more into the existence of how you run the vehicle.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And so the challenge with CarPlay is, of course, it's an app that runs in, you know, on the screen, but it sort of takes you out of the vehicle experience into a separate app that's very media centric. But it's very difficult to create consistency across all the different platforms and to create consistency with every part of the user interface. And so what's missing, you know, what draws like that question is like, I want to have the exact same. Ease of using my text or ease of using functions around my phone. And so what we've done is we've worked really hard with with Apple and similarly with Google

• 45:42Speaker 02

  to create the same menu of options, but we're Rivian is the we're we're setting the table. And and so, for example, we have an Apple Music integration. We just did a Apple Watch integration as a key. We have Google Maps integration. You know, two years ago, three years ago, this was a bigger issue because we didn't have all those integrations. And some of those discussions we have with our partners at Apple and with with Google took some time. But we're now in a place where we have a great working relationship with Apple, a great working relationship with Google, where we can serve up all those items. And now we're doing the backend work, which we just demonstrated, to really enable on more of an agent to agent basis, all the integration of the backends of these apps

• 46:27Speaker 02

  to create a more seamless experience. So you could say to the car, I want to go to dinner tomorrow. I want it to be after my meeting, you know, that meeting with with Bill. And I need to be home in time for this. And it can collect all that information between your Google Calendar.

• 46:43Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  The state of charge of the vehicle, where the vehicle is. But that integration and aggregation of all the information is really hard to do. If you leave the vehicle and go into a separate app that doesn't have access to those same types of information. So that was that's the reason. You know, it certainly has blocked, as Chris said. Some customers have said, I don't want to buy Rivian because I want CarPlay, which is like we reckon like we're not blind to that. We recognize it.

• 47:08Kara Swisher?

  Right. So that gets into the final thing I want to talk about about AI, because AI is part of that. And autonomous vehicles, which is another area I'm very I'm very bullish on. Rivian recently announced some new AI features coming to its call. As you develop the new custom chip, their plans to roll its self-driving capabilities. Obviously, you've announced ambitions to enter the robotaxi space. Talk a little bit about your ambitions. Tesla has been promising customers they'll be able to turn their cars into robotaxis for years. But it's turned out to be Google and Waymo. And Chris Urmson was the original person there.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:40Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit. About what you'll be able to deliver when Tesla has just not been able to do so, and certainly should have been able to do so, although he has some obsession with the lack of cameras.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  So I think there's an important thing to note here, which is the nature of how we develop self-driving has changed really dramatically in the last couple of years. And if you go back to, you talked about Chris, if you go back to the beginning when Chris first started working in this area, the way self-driving systems were designed is you had a perception platform, which depending on the design of the overall system, could be cameras, but more like those cameras plus radar plus LiDAR, that would perceive the world, identify objects in the world, classify those objects, associate vectors with those objects, and then hand all that classified object information to a planner. And the planner was a rules-based environment that was written by humans.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Humans were trying to codify or describe how a vehicle operates, what are the rules of the road. And those were the systems that were designed and built up through the late,

• 48:48Speaker 02

  call it 2020, 2021. And even Rivian's launch vehicle, we first launched with in late 2021, was one of those systems. So I would call that like an AV1.0 solution. These were not neural net-based solutions. These were not systems that used things like transformer-based encoding. But around 2021, 2022, the state of the art, in part informed by some of the things that had been happening in the LLM space, the large language model space, started to shift to say, can we take more of a neural net-based approach and build a foundation model that describes how the world works through a much more complex, large parameter model? And to do that, you need to control the perception platform.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  So you can't go through third parties that process this. And you need raw signals from your cameras, your radars, and if you have them, your lighters. You need to be able to trigger interesting events that you can then train off of, then move those interesting events offline to build this very, very large parameter model that describes how the world works. And so we made the decision at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, to start working on that system, on this neural net-based approach. And to do that, you need to first have the hardware, and then you need to launch it, and then you need to get enough vehicles in the car park to have a data flywheel.

• 50:08Kara Swisher?

  You need data.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  You need lots of data. So here's where it gets interesting. So we launched that hardware platform in the middle of 2024. That was what we call our Gen two vehicle. And the biggest change was our autonomy stack. So in-house compute platform, in-house perception. And then over the course of last year, started to build enough vehicles in the car park to build this this really robust data flywheel. But we approached it in a way that is probably not fully understood. So I'm so glad I get to talk about it here, which is the sensors that are on the vehicles are not just there to drive the vehicle. They're very importantly there as part of a large scale data acquisition platform for building a model. And if I were to characterize how I think about autonomy over the next, call it three years, relative

• 50:53Speaker 02

  to the last three or four years, the rate of progress that we will see as an industry is going to be substantially higher. And that's because of this inflection point towards neural net based approaches. And so we're, I'm like, beyond bullish on this.

• 51:10Kara Swisher?

  So why do you think you'll be able to deliver on this vision? Tesla hasn't been able to do so. They're trying, he's been trying to do that. And I mean, I know he's busy making non-consensual sexual material. But why has that not been able? Because they do have all those elements, right? They certainly do.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if we like, look at the spread of how you build this, you need large data set, lots of vehicles deployed. You have two ends of the spectrum, which are interesting. One is Waymo. It's a relatively small fleet.

• 51:38Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  But with a very

• 51:40Kara Swisher?

  Huge.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  robust sensor set.

• 51:41Kara Swisher?

  Right, absolutely.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Lots of megapixels, lots of data. And then the other end of the spectrum, you have Tesla with a very constrained sensor set. So, you know, the cameras are calling, they're okay, but their dynamic range, you know, low light performance, bright light performance isn't great. So it's like very limited sensor set. We took the approach of saying, we're going to have a much bigger fleet than Waymo, a smaller fleet than Tesla, but we need our vehicles to learn faster. And so every one of our R2 vehicles, when we launch the LiDAR variant, will have a LiDAR. And so LiDAR is an important thing because it gives us a, it protects a lot of corner cases, particularly like very long range corner cases.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  But it also is a great platform for turning the entire fleet into ground truth. And so that's our goals, radar, LiDAR plus camera.

• 52:31Kara Swisher?

  I always note to people, when one car learns, they all do as opposed to a human being. So last a couple of questions. You were just on the podcast Access and you said you think within the next three to five years, autonomy is going to be as critical as having tires on a vehicle. And that not buying AV capable car will be like buying a cell phone without Wi-Fi. Now, as I noted back in 2019, I wrote a column about how owning a car would be like owning a horse down the line. Why, why even own a car when you have an insurer, maintain, pay tens of thousands of dollars for not to mention deal with legal fallout if it gets in an accident and also human socket driving at the very base level. Talk about that. You have visions of robotaxis. Now, again, the only people who have delivered consistently has been Waymo and Zooks to a

• 53:15Kara Swisher?

  lesser extent. There's stuff happening, obviously, in China that's very quite robust, actually. Talk about why you think that's a critical part. You don't have to comment on not owning a car. I just don't think people are going to own cars, but that's just me.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, to your last point, I think that the business model, the customer model on how you, let's call it purchase mobility, purchase transportation, I think could change a lot, but putting that aside, because recognizing regardless of whether you own the car, you're purchasing a ride, you're purchasing a subscription, all the different ways you could conceivably consume transportation. The level four, the ability for the vehicle to operate itself, and importantly, operate itself empty, is the enabler. And so our view is that that's going to go from a very, very small subset of vehicles today, as you said, the only deployed at scale variant of that is Waymo, to becoming something that if you're buying a vehicle.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  You know, having what we call personal level four is going to become very important. And of course, if you want a different mobility model, it's a necessity to enable that mobility model. And so I think this is, this is going to represent the biggest shaking of the nature of the auto industry.

• 54:34Kara Swisher?

  Mobility.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Of just the whole thing, like market shares can shift dramatically with this. And so we've, we've decided, and this has been a, a long effort for us, that's the most important investment area for the business. So it's by far where we invest our most capital. As we think of like our R and D budget, it shifted from a lot of the traditional vehicle level innovations, which are now fairly stable, electronics platform, so on, and moving those dollars.

• 54:59Kara Swisher?

  To autonomy.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  To autonomy.

• 55:00Kara Swisher?

  And what will be the critical thing for your company to do so?

• 55:04Speaker 02

  We need a robust data flywheel. We need a lot of GPs to train the model. And we took the decision, this is a decision we took, geez, almost four years ago, to bring inference, to bring silicon in-house. And, and the reason for that, there's so much focus on the sensors, but the compute is actually the really expensive part.

• 55:24Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  So we, we said, look, we need to bring compute in-house versus a dependency on Nvidia to allow us to put very high levels of compute into every car. And so we want every car to have a really capable brain. But LIDARs are no longer a thousand dollar things. They're.

• 55:42Kara Swisher?

  No, they're nothing.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  You know, it's low hundreds of dollars. Radars are low tens of dollars. Cameras are low tens of dollars. So the, the perception platform, as much as that gets, as visual you see it, as much as it gets a lot of attention, it's the little, you know, silicon wafer that's the most expensive part of the car or most expensive part of the stack. And so we brought that in-house so that we could deploy everywhere as part of this overall philosophy on, on building a data flywheel.

• 56:07Kara Swisher?

  In that environment, what you're talking about, which is, I agree with you, this is where cars are going. How do you, that, you still have to run a car company. You still have to sell cars. You still need money. Does that require you get purchased by a larger, like an Apple or, or something else? Or can you do this on your own? You also have to make money, as I said, you can't just have this. And and to get, you know, this this valley you need to go through is quite long and difficult. And then the second one is what then happens to a competitor like Tesla? I have not asked you one Elon question because I'm so tired, sick and tired of him. But he's still critical and you can see him talking about it, even though it's in this sort of strange way. When he's talking about robotics, I understand what he's saying.

• 56:53Kara Swisher?

  Why wouldn't a Tesla be able to do this better eventually, if he ever focused on it? Versus you, what what will it take to do that? You don't have the benefit of a meme stock that doesn't represent your business.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so and we said it before, R2 is really important for us. It demonstrates that like a path to the automotive side of our business being profitable.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  And the revenue associated with that vehicle covering our fixed costs, that's that's really important. But I think maybe at the maybe in a more philosophical way, the deeper part of the question is, how many companies ultimately can be successful? So if you look historically, automotive is a very big, it's a huge market. And the TAM is enormous, but it's not one in which there's a single dominant player. And you know, very different than tech. So if you look at tech in each segment, there's one, two, maybe three companies that occupy the vast majority of market share. In automotive, on a global basis, the largest manufacturer represents around 10%.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  And so the question is, does that continue or does it consolidate down to like one or two companies? And and my view has continues to evolve on this.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Maybe without saying exactly how many companies I think there will be in the end, I think.

• 58:14Kara Swisher?

  So right ahead, how many?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's helpful to think about what are the ingredients necessary to be a car company at scale? And I do think there'll be more than one, but I think there's probably going to be less than there are today. But the ingredients that are, I think, like a must have is the vehicle to be a successful at scale vehicle manufacturer, putting aside like very niche, call it like, you know, almost like a horse like vehicles, vehicles that are just like anachronisms of the past. But to be at scale, the vehicle must be software defined, which allows for robust new features to be deployed, which to do that well, it means breaking from. The network architecture and ECU topology of 100 to 150 different companies writing little islands of software that then gets integrated on a canvas

• 59:01Speaker 02

  architecture. I think that's, there's absolutely no way a company can be at scale in five to 10 years and still have that architecture. Now, that statement sounds subtle, but that's a big statement because there's only two companies in the Western world that have a software-defined architecture, Tesla and Rivian. Of course, the deal we did with Volkswagen unlocks this for them. But that means every car company, if you believe what I just said, will have to find a path to moving to a very different software and electronics architecture than what they've had historically. Number one. The second thing, which requires the first thing to really do the second thing well, is the vehicles will need very high levels of both AI integration

• 59:45Speaker 02

  and autonomy. And I think that if you miss autonomy as a car company, when if you're a customer and you have a choice of I can buy a car for 35, $40,000 and it can, you know, drop me at the airport, it can go to the grocery store to pick up, you know, stuff for me, it can drop a friend at a house, it can do all those things, or a car that doesn't do that. It's, it's going to be very binary, right? I think there'll be very few people that will self-select to say, I don't want those features. Even folks who are not comfortable with the idea of self-driving, once you experience it one or two times.

• 1:00:18Kara Swisher?

  It does. I try to say that to everybody.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  It's so sticky. Because you get your time back. Suddenly, you can be reading a book on your phone. It's, it's just so sticky.

• 1:00:26Kara Swisher?

  My one way of convincing one person I'm like, who likes to party, I'm like, you can, you can text and drink. I don't know what to say. There's my, that's my sale for you. But go ahead, sorry.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  But, but I do think this just represents like a big, like, it's like taking all the different companies in our market shares and shaking them up and saying, this is going to be a different looking outcome. And here's the part that I don't know the answer to and is.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  You know, it's provocative just to think about it, which is if market shares of some of these larger incumbent companies drops by even a small percent, these are very, very high fixed cost businesses and they're big machines, so not easy to reduce costs. And we have an example of what happens when market, you know, the revenue drops by 20 to 30, 35% and that's 2008, 2009. And so that's the part that's hard to predict is if, if some of these changes I talked about, the combination of being a software-defined architecture and having very high levels of AI integration are not, if you're not front of the curve and you start to lose

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  20, 30% of your volume, you, you just have the risk of being clobbered, like just completely clobbered by your fixed cost. And that, that could lead to like this slowly, slowly, slowly, suddenly changes in the dynamics within the space.

• 1:01:49Kara Swisher?

  You know, interestingly, and I'll let you have the West word, it's like Netflix circa when they, they got off of discs.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Kara Swisher?

  And I remember talking to media companies, they said, you're finished with what they're doing, you, you don't understand what they're doing here. And so it's like that, like, and of course here they are poised to buy up one of the greatest brands, the former greatest brands, if they make it through. So if that comes to pass, can Rivian be one of those things or just a junk heap on the?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you're asking a highly biased perspective here, but of course, like our, our view is, and that's what we're working towards, is to be one of the companies in the end that's both creating products, you know, for consumers that are just incredible and obviously software-defined, obviously very high levels of autonomy in AI. But the second part is we do believe, and part of the strategy with our Volkswagen deal, we do believe there's an opportunity to help some of the existing legacy companies that weren't born the way that Rivian was born and don't have this deep technology backbone to come up on the learning curve.

• 1:02:52Kara Swisher?

  But does that mean you might need an even bigger partner, like an Apple or someone else?

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  No, no, I more meant.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Like the existence proof that Rivian technology can be deployed into a existing OEM. If you were to think of like, what's the ultimate existence proof? You'd probably say, let's pick one of the largest, most complex OEMs in terms of brand proliferation and market participation. And if you're looking for that, that would be Volkswagen Group. It's a very large group. It's got lots of different brands. And so our ability to demonstrate that we can deploy in a productized way our software and electronics, and this is not yet even talking about autonomy, just software and electronics, is the existence proof or is the demonstration that should show other manufacturers, hey, one Rivian can be a great partner.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  We've demonstrated this now with Volkswagen. We've of course demonstrated this with another very, very large company, Amazon. And so I do think the opportunity for us to not only have our own products, but to emerge as a, as a very, uh, you know, very capable technology partner and provider that has both the ability to work with and the humility to work with very large existing companies is something we hope to demonstrate.

• 1:04:13Kara Swisher?

  So very last question, 20, 30 years, that puts you and Tesla at a complete competition, presumably, if, if he can get his attention back to this. What is Rivian in 20 years, say it survives this, what does it look like? Last question. Um. I know you don't think in those timeframes, but.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  I mean, you have to think about it somewhat. I mean, the way we make investments in technology, the, the goal is to be one of the most impactful and, uh, you know, important businesses in transportation technology. And, and like, I do think we're at an inflection point, aside from businesses, like from a societal point of view around how our vehicles are powered, what's going to happen as AI enters the physical world? And a huge motivator for me is to, to help be part of writing that story and, and to do it in a way that's, you know, to the benefit of society.

• 1:05:05Kara Swisher?

  Great. All right, RJ, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:05:13Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to drive autonomously with me in San Francisco. That's all I do when I'm in that city. If not, you get a horse. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

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